Caught Soul

Betsy Struthers is a poet and novelist and the author of Found: A Body.

Caught Soul is an evocation of the West Coast, the magic of ocean and island where the spell of the shaman still lingers and where grief at the death of parents lives on in rain on rock. The poetry chants its strong measures, distorted at times by too facile rhymes (“How many orphaned women know / their mothers with the spring tide go?” from “Daughter Sonnet”); by predictable and painful puns (“abstract on white / to be read” from “Text(ure)”); awkward constructions (“I wait for the dead / in my living midnight room” from “Livingroom — Midnight”); and by a prevalence of unnecessary parentheses around phrases, words, and parts of words which disrupt while adding little to the reading. There are some very good poems, notably “Blueberries Are My Kin Now,” “She The Living,” “Reading,” and “The Heart of the Peninsula.” In poems such as “Stone Eye,” the poet’s mystic attachment to the landscape couples with images of loss and grief to produce such fine lines as these:

My hands compress beneath the water’s film
like a photograph taken, cold, in Nature.

However, such fine and accurate images are come by rarely in this first collection.